


after, in the dark

by VictoriaSqualor



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Cowgirl Position, F/M, Force Bond, Frenzied Post-Fight Fucking, Redemption in Progress, Scars, The Glorious Existential Sadness of Ben Solo, lip biting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 12:15:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6005500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VictoriaSqualor/pseuds/VictoriaSqualor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The unseen implications of a Force bond are something both Rey, and the man once known as (and now again trying to be) Ben Solo, are struggling with. Some things can only be hashed out in darkened rooms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	after, in the dark

**Author's Note:**

> Complete, smutty version of a short thing I posted originally on Tumblr. Will probably go back and fill in the blanks re: their "first time", but had a mighty need for Ben brooding about the Resistance base.

In the beginning, he refuses to leave his room. He goes there directly from the medbay, as soon as the synthskin has been grafted to his mechanical hand, and emerges for nothing, not even for meals. General Organa has a tray delivered several times a day; sometimes it sits untouched altogether, and sometimes it disappears inside, though no one ever hears the hiss of a pneumatic door opening. Housekeeping droids attempt entry periodically, but none ever cross the threshold.

Rey overhears the jokes cracked quietly about him in the officers’ mess. An underbaked attempt at a Sith Lord; an overgrown teenager in the middle of a very long sulk; another one-handed Skywalker-- _it’s getting to be a habit with them, isn’t it?_ The laughter subsides and the topic is quickly changed when the General enters the room, or when one of them catches Rey’s disapproving glare from across the room. They don’t know her any better than they do him.

Finn knows her better, but even he doesn’t understand, and she would never ask him to. _A_ bond _?_ he’d asked with incredulous disgust when she’d tried to explain things to him, as simply as she could without dredging up a thousand years of arcane Jedi lore. _You do know he almost killed me, right? And you too!_

 _I know. He knows._ And he’s paying the price, she hadn’t bothered to add, because she felt it wouldn’t help matters anyway. He might have lost a limb, but to Finn it looked like he was just being coddled after a seventeen-year tantrum, and Rey would never convince him otherwise. She is almost relieved when he and Poe are sent on reconnaissance to Lothal that will take several weeks; it buys her a reprieve.

A week passes, a week of fitful sleep in which Rey stares up at the ceiling of her own tiny barracks room as she tries to call to him through the Force, but every feeler she sends out meets a silent, impenetrable wall. He has closed himself down to her entirely, after that brief and dreamlike reverie on the _Falcon_ where, the both of them covered in soot and sweat and dried plasma, he allowed her to know every inch of him, every plane of his body, every dark crevasse of his consciousness; and while she feels his turmoil, she also feels slighted by the distance. _Ben,_ she calls to an empty room _. Let me in, please. It’s me._

It is not until the following night, as she lies awake curling her toes against the thin mattress and drifting in the waters off Luke’s island, that a small, insistent beacon shines its way into her drowsy mind. The transmission is curt and abrupt, yet heavy with longing. _I need you._

She slips out of her room and down the corridor to his, clinging to the shadows, while at the same time not caring who sees. He lies curled into a tight ball, his back to her, facing the wall. His hair, damp from a shower, spills in dark rivulets across his pillow. He wears a tunic of soft stone grey and loose black trousers; she knows, somehow intuitively, that his old, tattered, bloodstained robes have merely been shoved into a drawer, pushed out of sight and out of mind. Like his mother, they are a matter he does not yet know how to confront.

She stands there a moment longer, watching him, until he breaks the silence.

_I...I was afraid._

This is all the explanation she will receive for his self-imposed quarantine; it is no less than she expects. There will be no discussion of the vagary that occurred at the moment she severed his hand, sending his lightsaber skidding across the floor and into a chasm; of how she stared into his eyes, dark and dilated with terror and then resignation as he waited for the killing blow that never came. There is no need; it is seared into both their minds, across their hearts. _I feel it, too,_ she had stuttered softly, before she had fallen to her knees beside him.

 _Still?_ she asks, pressing one knee into the mattress.

He doesn’t respond; he only extends one long arm toward her, fingers outstretched, without so much as craning his head around to look at her. She takes his hand and slides effortlessly into the bed behind him, molding her body to the contours of his, winding her legs around his waist.

 _Do you want me to stay?_ A pointless question to which she already knows the answer, but she wants to hear it nonetheless.

 _Yes._ His voice is so painfully soft, his request almost a whisper. Ben Solo, keeping his only light close by in case his darkness returns. Rey closes her eyes, presses her forehead to the nape of his neck and lets the tide overtake them both.  


* * *

 

She wakes to the sound of ragged sobbing. _I’m sorry. I’m sorry,_ he chokes breathlessly, thrashing in the tangle of sheets, grasping and scrabbling at something beyond his reach--Han, eyes blank and mouth slack, tumbling away into a blinding-white abyss. The realization hits her with a jolt that makes her eyes water and her chest ache.

 _Ben. Ben._ She pulls at his sleeve, tenderly cradles his face between her hands, puts her lips next to his ear. _Ben, please._ He shakes violently, tears squeezing through tightly-shut lids, still babbling apologies--she silences him with a kiss, and he convulses, blinking up at her, one trembling, sweaty hand palming her cheek.

 _Rey,_ he exhales, a deep and shuddering sigh, and she realizes that this is only the second occasion on which she’s heard him say her name. For so long she’d been reduced to a litany of other impersonal epithets, tinged with varying amounts of wonderment and acid-- _you, the girl, a scavenger, Jedi._ Fair play--he’d only been _creature_ and _monster_ to her, far less human entities. But when she’d been ferrying him back to base on the _Falcon--_ that was, when she’d been straddling him in the sickbay bunk, tearing at his clothing, half-crazed in her desperation to get at his hot bare skin in spite of his wounds and his freshly cauterized stump of a wrist--he’d been moaning it like a prayer chant, over and over. As though he craved the way it rolled off his tongue. His true name was just as fascinating to her--a soft, rounded, inoffensive syllable that conjured images of the boy he must have been, a mumbling, blushing youth with overlarge ears, trying vainly to live up to the venerable old Jedi master who had been his namesake.

Rey regards his face silently for a moment, tiny moles scattered across it like stars, slashed by that deep, jagged river of scar tissue that she had once left in the wake of her rage--it feels so long ago, now, though it has been scarcely more than a year. His generous mouth is red and chapped, a glossy bead of blood welling in a split in his lower lip. Closing her eyes, she leans forward to capture that lip in her own mouth, tasting copper as she pulls hard enough with her teeth to draw out a cry. He responds in kind, his long fingers wrenching through her hair and loosening her tightly bound buns, greedily suckling on her tongue; he only lets go with the utmost reluctance, as she suspects will become a recurring theme with him.  Like her, he has never known these touches before, but he gorges himself upon them like a dying man at an oasis who never quite gets his fill. She wonders if he is making up for lost time, or if he just fears the oasis will vanish before his eyes, as suddenly as it once appeared.

She nuzzles the base of his throat, licking his collarbone and tasting the salt of his skin as she tugs open the buttons at the top of his tunic. _Shhhhhh. Let me,_ she soothes him, and he doesn’t resist. His heart is still pounding like mad.

 _I want...I want…_ he breathes, and he never says what he wants, but he groans soft encouragement at Rey as she tugs his tunic up over his shoulders, placing tiny kisses down his sternum, which makes him wheeze. She draws her fingertips lightly, leisurely down the swells of his pectoral muscles, lets them ghost over his hardening nipples before lowering her head to lightly graze each one with her teeth. His hips jerk against hers, and she can feel the twitch of his hardening cock beneath the thin weave of his trousers.

Smiling against his chest, she traces her way down the sparse line of dark hair trailing from his navel, following it all the way down beneath the waistband. The first time, there had been too much urgency for tender touches--she had gripped him only long enough to guide him into place. Her fingers tentatively encircle that engorged length of hot, hot flesh, sheathed in velvety skin that slides easily in her grip. He hisses and jerks again, breathes her name louder this time, and in her excitement she squeezes harder. A sticky droplet rolls down her thumb; she withdraws her hand in order to examine it, licks it experimentally, ponders the strange musky taste of him. He moans at the sight, arching his hips as he tries to wriggle out of the confining trousers. His pale legs are mottled with more scars--this one of her making, that one possibly from Finn, others so old and healed over they might well predate her birth. His body is less a star chart than a tactical map, a scroll telling of one battle after another, all playing out upon his skin and inside his head.

 _It’s all yours._ The thought comes to her unbidden; she thinks it belongs to him, and one look in his dark, fathomless eyes confirms it. Desire unspools between her thighs, warm and wet, and she cannot wait any longer.

Soft noises of impatience catch in her throat as she hastily sheds her own clothing, hurling them into the darkness beyond. The way he watches her now, naked and exposed as she fumbles in her desperation to mount him, is familiar--the same way he regarded her when they stood facing each other in the falling snow, in the heartbeat before they clashed sabers for the first time. Awe, bewilderment, wonder--and longing. His huge hands dig deep into her soft hips as she rises above him, his cock firmly in hand, dragging the slick tip along the length of her own moist slit before drawing a deep breath and pushing down as hard as she possibly can.

The sensation rocks them both; he nearly _howls,_ but without air the most she can manage is a whimper. She anchors her fingers in his shoulders as his thick shaft stretches her open, nails digging crescent-moon grooves into his skin as she rocks back and forth, clashing hard against his own bucking hips with each stroke. His hands are frantic, roaming over every inch of her body they can possibly reach, his fingers grasping at her nipples, kneading her thighs, massaging the twin globes of her ass.  He reaches between them, between their sweat-slicked bellies, and prods at her clit; with a yelp, she loses balance entirely, and suddenly, swiftly, he is atop her, her own legs kicked high in the air as he reasserts himself between her thighs. There will be fresh scars across his back tomorrow, but somehow she thinks he won’t mind.

She writhes beneath him, lost in too many explosive sensations to wrest back control; his skilled fingers are still masterfully working her swollen clit, his pulsing cock still slamming into her and allowing her little more than enough breath to gasp his name. _Ben. Ben. Ben._ Over and over, a chanted prayer, until at last, something explodes and her vision is obliterated, her consciousness engulfed in white-hot fire; she doesn’t know she’s crying out until she hears her own echo bouncing off the walls. Her throat is raw; her whole body throbs and thrums, every cell alive with vibration.

The same thing has happened to Ben, she knows, as he slumps over her, suddenly drained, a mass of quivering limbs no longer able to support itself. He crumbles to the bed beside her, content in his defeat, and presses a moist kiss to her shoulder, then another to her ear.

 _Stay,_ he whispers, a request more than a command, and one she knows he fears she will deny him.  
  
_I’m here,_ she whispers back, fingers sifting gently through his damp hair. She cannot allow herself to think about what is yet to come for them, what trials lie ahead. But she is here with him, now, in the dark, and nothing else matters.


End file.
